As per Jaroslaw Kowalski on the EF team:

"We are working with SQL Server CE team to get an updated version of their provider that will be compatible with EF Beta3 out soon. It is a matter of weeks"

source: MSDN forums

Roger collected all of his Visual Studio Magazine covers (that is, those issues where articles written by him were featured on the cover) in one blog post. It's quite impressive!

Thanks to Mike Taulty for keeping me in the loop. For some reason, when linking directly to the video, the sound was wierd, so here's the MSN video site where you'll have to watch a 5 second ad first. It's worth it!

This is funny and it is always a great reminder to see Bill Gates sense of humor and his ability to laugh at himself. I think when we had the meeting with him last month, none of us were thinking of this - we were all so serious. Sheesh!

Roger Jennings writes about issues with finding examples of complex LINQ to XML queries. Boy have I been there and done that. One of the problems with learning LINQ is that you have two options

1) learn LINQ very deeply so you can do what you need

or

2) learn by example

With LINQ, I tend to start with a need, do what I can until I hit a wall, then look for examples that will help me and use them to learn even more. But it means that there needs to be a LOT of examples.

I have often likened learning LINQ as well as learning Entity SQL to learning T-SQL. Learning T-SQL has, for me, been an evolution which has occurred over some ten years. I still have to look up the Cast & Convert topic 99% of the time in the docs whenever I need to convert a datetime to a desired char format.

Even if there were 1001 examples, I know that there will always be something I want to do that I can't find an example for and will have to rely on gaining a better understanding of LINQ in order to accomplish it.

Well, not 101, but after spending over 15 hours trying to fix a damaged file, I learned a LOT and thought I would share it here.

[A New DevLife Post]

As a woman who is a little curvier from the waist down than I'd like to be, you think I would hail this report, "Are Curvy women smarter?" , as "justfication"  - "hey, it just because I'm smart!" (and maybe more potato chips in my future ) . But it seems pretty ludicrous to me, especially considering some of the many brilliant women I know who are slim & trim.

Entity Framework easily supports mapping to read stored procedures when the query results match up with an existing entity in the model. If your query results don't, then you have to create a new read only entity and entity set in teh CSDL and a new "fake table" entity and entity set in the SSDL and then you can do the mappings. (I show how to do that in this blog post.)

Chris Snyder found a new twist. What if the result matches an entity, but some of the fields inthe result have been renamed? Unless you wanted to create a read only entity to match it. But then you won't get the change tracking benefits of a entity with a key.

Jonathan Carter was very interested in Entity Framework and Astoria. Last month, he started working for Microsoft as an Technical Evangelist. So he gets paid to share his excitement about these and other .NET technologies.

Guy Burstein was very interested in Entity Framewrok and Astoria writing lots of posts about the two topics. Today Guy announced that he has started working for Microsoft Israel with the Developer & Platform and Adoption team. He too says he has found the sweet spot of getting paid to do something that you are good at and love.

Congrats!!

Jessica Fosler reminded me of a cool article on 3D printers I read this fall. Read more...

[A new DevLife post]

Well, that would be -0.3 degrees. Good day to stay inside and work even thought it's beautiful and sunny out with still llots of fabulous powder over at Mad River. To some it just means a better day to skin up the mountain than to sit in the chair lift up high in the air with the bitter cold wind blowing in your face. Brrr.

According to Chris Bowen's blog, there will be a TechNet and MSDN event in Burlington on February 26th.

The afternoon MSDN event will be two sessions covering:

MSDN:  "Explore IIS7, ASP.NET and Tackle Web Security"

Check out the latest coding solutions with like-minded developers at MSDN Events. Witness the evolution of IIS and see why IIS7 is our most extensible, manageable and secure Web platform on record. You'll learn how to extend application services - including membership, role management and navigation - from ASP.NET and how to consume them from a wide variety of clients. As a special bonus, we're also tackling the biggest security risks and clueing you in to the top counter measures available for Websites and Web applications of all kinds. Don't miss these free, live sessions that are really on your wavelength.

Register for the MSDN event at www.msdnevents.com

The morning TechNet event is also about security:

Today I did what people think that I do frequently, though it's actually (and sadly) not common. I went skiing. That's right  - on a work day! RIch and I took off at 8:30 and didn't get home until about 3:30. We hooked up with a fellow Vermont.NETter and awesome tele skiier who commented on how many people must have called in sick that morning (which made Rich and I , both self-employed, laugh about being the only ones not getting paid to ski), and spent most of the day in the woods. I'm a crappy skiier in the woods (always worried about those trees!) but I still love being in there. It's not pretty, but I can get through it.

Mad River got about 2 feet of this fluffy stuff on Monday and Tuesday.So we had epic powder (western style powder, deep and light and fluffy) and I wasn't going to miss it. Even if it was 0 degrees out. Brr! 

My parents continue to send me pictures of the puppies to put on their website.

The first litter , which was born on Nov 22  - the amazing litter of 17 - has puppies that are over 10 lbs. already. They had their first cookies today. Their eyes have been open for a while.

The second and third litter, born Dec 7 & 8th, are still small, but they are getting fatter and cuter (is it even possible?) every day.

While there are lots of awesome new features in VB9 and C#3.0, everything has taken a back seat to LINQ. I am, however, growing more and more fond of extension methods. Read more...

[A new DevLife post]

I've been snooping around the web and found links for many of the db vendors (and 3rd party vendors) to try to watch their own news about what they are doing for Entity Framework.

Here's Dave Sceppa's list of companies working on EF providers and interleaved with his list are my best stabs at a blog or page on their website to watch:

And, missing from Dave's list is Oracle.

I'm watching Christopher Shay's blog for any news.

Yes, you are reading this on a dasBlog site and I love dasBlog, but I spent the Christmas holiday playing with the public beta of Graffiti and I really do think they have nailed it for a lightweight CMS/blogging system.

Out of the box, it is really simple to use, but don't let it's simplicity fool you. It is so customizable on two levels. For any end user, the widgets are fabulous and take no braincells to use. For those adept in CSS and HTML, the themes can be customized very deeply. The macros expose gobs of functionality and the views are really easy to leverage. I was able to give the site my own look by starting with one of the available themes, then replacing most of the image files that are used in the theme.

I believe that in using Graffiti, I'm getting a really good taste of either MVP or MVC here.

Also, the fact that you can just plop in an Access database (default) or other database without having to set up SQL Server if you don't want to is a big advantage. This closes the gap between one of the important features of dasBlog - all of the content is stored in files so there's no need to deal with SQL Server - and something like Community Server which requires a database. However, my blog is now made of up over 1300 separate xml files. This definitely makes me nervous. In fact, I looked at CS first, but was stopped by the fact that you have to host the database independently. I didn't see a way to just add the tables and other elements into my existing hosted database.

I've been building something that is not even going to be used as a blog, but a mini-site where I can aggregate some particular blog posts and other content.

One tip regarding the Access database I can share is this. If you want to test Graffiti out locally and you are using Vista, there are a show-stopper issues with permissions to MDB files in IIS7. I spent hours trying to get around it and finally gave up. I was able to open and run it in VS2008 using the web development server instead. When I FTPd everything to my webhost (which means IIS6) there were no problems at all using the Access file. I ended up doing 98% of my customization on the hosted site anyway.

No, it's not what you think I was going to say...

But David Sceppa from the EF team is working on one and it's on the MSPress website!

Which made me go to amazon and look some more and wouldn't you know I found a few more...

Not surprised that Roger's at work on a book!

Perhaps there will be more... only time will tell!

Last spring, I ran into Don Box in the hallways at MIX07.

I hadn't seen him in quite a while and asked what he had been up to lately in his wizard's tower.

Though he couldn't really talk about what he was doing, he did say that he was working on some cool new stuff and having fun.

I had a quick fantasy about suggesting in a blog post that perhaps Don was working on the next version of Visual Basic, which would have been, of course, a completely insane idea. Don has a bit of a history with VB and I have a bit of a history of calling him out for public jibes at VB (which were likely more innocent than they sounded....).

On the other hand, it was definitely painful to sit in a WCF session a number of years ago where he had been clearly coerced to code in VB (after he was swayed to actually use Visual Studio rather than emacs in public ), though the audience was composed of about 95% C# programmers. I felt badly for him, though he managed to have a little fun with it.

Again, it was no more than a silly idea that crossed my mind, provide me with a momentary evil grin and then it was forgotten, because it could so easily be taken out of context.

Who knew my silly little idea was closer to the truth than I could ever have dreamed? Not to suggest that he is, in fact, working on VBX, but he certainly is whistling (or is that singing) a different tune when it comes to VB these days.

Check out this Channel 9 video with Don Box, Chris Anderson and Amanda Silver!

You can read more of Don's new-found VB love over on his blog (and look for some posts about the fact that his team is hiring!)

Vertek Corp in Burlington, VT has two software developer positions:

See their careers page for these two jobs and some others as well.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about Entity Framework in web applications and in SOA and worrying about performance, serialization and concurrency.

But I haven't spent a lot of time worrying about these things with respect to client apps (winforms and WPF).

In a great thread started by Nick in the forums where he was asking about keeping huge lists around in an application without having to hit the db over and over, both Danny Simmons and I assumed he was talking about web apps and started down the whole serialization/caching path.

But it turned out that Nick was worried about a WPF app which changes everything when you are thinking about performance.

In the end, Danny gave this great guidance (with my highlight):

"The context is safe to keep around as long as you are careful to make sure that it is always used only on a single thread (put it into thread local storage and have one copy for each thread if you need multiple threads).  The connection will open and close automatically as needed so you don't need to worry about holding a connection open.  Long-running contexts are the expected pattern for rich client apps--just not the right plan for asp.net scenarios and the like where you want the server to be as stateless as possible."